China Art Capital of the 21st C?

The Wall Street Journal runs a quick story on the prominence of Chinese artists in the global art economy. In that story, Christie’s expert, Ingrid Dudek, compares the shift to Asia with the famous shift from Paris to New York around the middle of the 20th Century. That shift was part of the Cold War’s cultural reorientation from Europe to America:

“What’s going on in China is very similar to what happened in New York City post-World War II,” says Ingrid Dudek, a senior specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie’s in Hong Kong. Like Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock—artists whose works in some ways captured the post-war American experience—Messrs. Zeng and Zhang have turned out works that people consider iconic of contemporary China. Born after 1949, both artists grew up under Communist party rule, came of age during the Cultural Revolution and experienced the diplomatic and commercial opening of China to the West. […]

Five Asian artists ranked among last year’s top 10 money-makers world-wide, according to Artprice, a research provider based in Lyon, France, which collected data on auction sales between June 2008 and June 2009. In the same 12-month period a year earlier, six Asian artists appeared, up from three in the previous period—and an indication of the growing clout of Chinese artists on the world’s art scene, which has been dominated by iconoclast names such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.